Both support methods were removed in favor of live chat and phone support. I reached out to GoDaddy’s media representatives and asked why the options were removed and why they weren’t more forthcoming about the changes. Nick Fuller, a GoDaddy representative explained that email consistently finished last as far as their customers’ preferred method of help.

After reviewing customer behavior and satisfaction scores we decided we could better serve people in ways they were telling us work better for them.

Customers love the ‘real time’ support experience. Email is not instantaneous and in fact many in the industry are putting an end to their email service as well because fewer than half of tech customers believe their problem can be solved by email – it’s sort of going the way of the cassette tape.

Former GoDaddy employee Brad Cook, was one of the first to report on the loss of email and ticket support. Cook documented his effort in a YouTube video showing the drawbacks of the live support option. He ended up having to wait 1.5 hours for help. Unfortunately, his wait was for nothing, “I had to rush into the other room as my son was getting sick right around the time my turn in line came up and I ended up missing my opportunity to chat after this long wait.”

Which Is A Quicker Means Of Support, Phone Or Live Chat?

On the afternoon of March 30th, I performed an experiment. I wanted to find out which method of support was quicker and whether or not the support representatives would try to upsell me on other services. I explained to both parties that I wanted to know when my domain was up for renewal.

Phone Support: The wait time on the phone was only nine minutes. Once on the line, the gentleman spoke English, was to the point, and politely asked how he could help. I asked when my domain was up for renewal. He told me the exact date while also explaining how I could find that information out myself via the GoDaddy control panel. He said they could renew it for me on the phone or I could do it myself. I chose to do it myself.

He asked how else he could help and I told him that was the only question I had. He thanked me and said have a good day. At no point during the phone call did he try to sell me services such as webhosting to go with my domain. In fact, the experience was better than I expected.

Live Chat:

I started the Live Chat session at the same time I called GoDaddy. As you can see from the image below, I had to wait 35 minutes. While Cook experienced inaccurate waiting times, I found mine to be relatively accurate.

Waiting In A Virtual Line

After waiting on the live chat for 10 minutes, I already had my problem solved via phone support. When I eventually got the chance to speak with a tech support representative, I was able to verify a couple of problems outlined by Cook.

There is no audible or visual cue that indicates it’s my turn to talk

If the chat window is minimized, it doesn’t blink in the taskbar when a message has been received

I asked the chat rep when my domain would need to be renewed. They responded in a few minutes with the correct answer and told me they could renew it for me, or I could do it manually. I told them I’d do it manually. I thanked the rep for helping me. After the usual you’re welcome message, my chat session was closed. At no point during the chat session did they try to sell me services such as webhosting to go with my domain.

GoDaddy Is Addressing Growing Pains With Live Chat

Phone support at GoDaddy was a superior experience compared to live chat. Because of the problems mentioned earlier, it’s too easy to miss your opportunity to chat with a representative. Once you’ve lost your chance, you have to go to the end of the line. I shared Cook’s post to GoDaddy and Fuller admits there is work to be done to improve the experience.

There’s work to be done and we’re just in the beginning phases of the transition. As of today, we’ve expanded our live chat support team by 20 representatives in order to better meet the demand in the general customer care chat. We’re also expanding the team for live chat support on the hosting side and we’re working with our live chat tool provider to provide an audio notification when a chat session is ready to go.

It’s a good thing GoDaddy has added more representatives to address demand because waiting for 30 minutes is unacceptable. I’ve used the live chat for HostGator and other service providers and the wait times have generally been under 10 minutes. Most of the time, I can reach someone without any wait at all.

I prefer live chat over speaking with someone on the phone because it’s a more natural means of communication for me. It’s also easier to send URL’s through chat than over the phone. However, I’m glad that each support method didn’t try to upsell me on additional products and services. Such a practice during a time of need is slimy at best.

Aligning With Customer Needs

I certainly don’t fault GoDaddy for doing away with email and ticket based support. Since their data supports the reasoning for getting rid of them, it makes sense. In mid 2013, GravityForms changed their standard support structure to remove forums. The move was inspired by the explosive growth of their product and the forum had become unmanageable.

I like support forums since they give me an opportunity to help myself but for successful companies, they can easily become unmanageable. But the move was made to better serve the needs of their customers.

As a company, it makes sense to do whatever is best for the customer. If you’d like advice on hiring support staff for your WordPress business, check out this post which contains advice from some of the most successful commercial WordPress theme companies.

When it comes to support, what is your preferred method? Tickets, FAQ’s, Forums, Email, or something else?

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76 Comments

I MUCH prefer the ticket system (with email follow-up) that WP uses. Reasons: I can type out the problem (and I write better than I speak, thankfully) and forget about it, go on to do other things. I DETEST both Phone and Live Support systems, which I’ve used with other providers–and in every case, I was no longer with those providers within a matter of days after the experience(s).

If there was one form of support I enjoyed, it was the process of creating a ticket. I could create it anytime I wanted and be done with it. All I’d have to do is wait for a reply. I too write better than I speak and it’s easier to share links and images via text than by word of mouth lol.

I would hate having to use only phone or live chat support. Thank goodness I don’t use GoDaddy.

My problem is that I hate WAITING. With email it’s not a problem, I send it off at my convenience and just wait for a response.

But I would hate having to sit on hold on the phone for longer than like 1 minute until it’s my turn. And I would hate having to monitor a live chat window for 30 minutes. Then if I have to use the bathroom when it’s my turn, I go to the end of the queue. That would be insanely frustrating.

I’d much rather send an email when it’s convenient for me, then do other things (rather than sitting in a queue) while I wait for them to reply via email.

I don’t think I’d ever sign up for a service that doesn’t have email/ticket support.

I was surprised by how long the live chat took to get a representative. Luckily for them, they are bringing on a lot more tech support people to handle the chat volume. At all times a day, it would be optimal to see 10 minutes or less wait time.

I liked the ticket system. I simply don’t like calling and talking to people about technical issues; it’s annoying to me. I prefer to write out the issue and have a written record. Also I don’t like waiting 32 minutes for chat, which is what I was recently quoted. I know they don’t care as I’m only one small customer, about 90 domains and a few hosting accounts, but I am a paying customer and the ticket system was a service I liked. All this means is that I will seek out another provider that serves my needs on my terms. Godaddy will lose my business. It’s about convenience and the ticket system was extremely convenient to me.

I think a lot of that response from customers had to do with canned responses and no easy way to take care of the massive influx of email support they were getting. I prefer tickets over support but if I understand correctly, there was a way to create a ticket via email.

What a frustrating experience you had! Why did you get thrown out? Did they end the session or did something happen?

The only times I’ve needed help with Go Daddy I’ve used telephone support because I needed the issue resolved asap. The few times I’ve used it it was the middle of the night my time so the wait time was minimal. It is weird that people think e-mail response is faster? I prefer telephone support.

I used Live Chat once for a different vendor and hated the experience because it was too easy to miscommunicate the issue and spend too much time explaining the issue over and over before the CSR is on the same page as me.

There’s nothing wrong with email or support ticket technology; the problem was that GoDaddy ticket support was absolutely horrible. The first reply is always a canned response that doesn’t address the issue, and then it goes downhill from there. GoDaddy ticket support never successfully solved a problem for me.

Now I have to wait to chat about a bug GoDaddy caused in my web site? Nope, it’s time to migrate to BlueHost.

When there’s a burning issue phone support is best but otherwise the ticketing system works because of the reasons previous commenters stated.
Also, phone support is a major pain with international customers that are from non-English speaking countries.

Being an arrant beginner, I’m constantly asking dumb questions – both in Hostgator and Volusion. In Hostgator, they offer BOTH phone and chat support – and I’ve found it best to ask for both at the same time – then take the first one to respond. Sometimes both are pretty slow.
Volusion have a GREAT system, You are automatically on phone assistance – but they give you an estimate (pretty darn accurate) of how long it will take for them to get to you. They THEN give you the option of waiting it out – or having them call you back. You can then leave your number – and they DO call you back. I just wish that more outfits would do this.

If they can push down chat wait time to some reasonable 5 minutes or so then why not.

The thing is that it usually took 24 hours from them to respond to emails/tickets and I still ended up calling them in case of emergency. If the chat wait time will be 30-60 minutes then there is no point of it anyway and I will still call them.

I think the consensus in these comments is that there are a lot of folks that actually don’t prefer phone and chat support. I’m sure a lot of GoDaddy’s customers are not tech savvy like those of us that read WP Tavern. However, I have to agree with others here that sending an email (or creating a ticket in a control panel, whatever) is much easier in the fact that it only takes a few minutes of my time. If I have an issue that’s really so bad that I cannot wait a few hours or until the next day, I could call or I also could research on my own. My hosting provider DigitalOcean doesn’t have chat or phone support, but they do answer emails and they do answer them in a timely fashion. Unless I was running a business that couldn’t experience any downtime whatsoever, I don’t see much need for anything else. If whole clusters die, I wouldn’t be the only one affected and my provider would already be on the issue. If I had a cluster of my own, I’d likely have a sysadmin of my own in some capacity.

– Users are less satisfied with email because troubleshooting over email is hard. You don’t have the instantaneous back-and-forth that comes with live chat or over-the-phone discussion. This leads to more frustration for users.

– Phone support is faster because less people are using the phone. So you have agents who aren’t as overwhelmed, are able to provide better quality support (see above), and in turn it boosts the satisfaction rating from customers.

– I suspect the GoDaddy chat agents are working multiple conversations simultaneously. That’d explain the delayed responses. The context switching isn’t good for the agents, though, as they’ve got a lot going on in their heads as they bounce between sessions.

– Removing the ticketing system has three “benefits”: 1.) you don’t have a massive backlog of tickets to slog through; 2.) agents can be re-allocated to other support methods; 3.) you reduce support volume by forcing people to open up a chat session or pick up the phone. There’s more commitment on the user’s side with both.

Took me 10 minutes to realise this, i emailed support@go*****.com and i got a reply that i need to use the online support help articles. I’m not a fan of live chat as i have to camp at my pc waiting for a representitve to attend to me, in which if im not at my pc they will close the chat after waiting 1 minute.
I just took notice that there is not live chat as well, Whats going on???

I hear people saying they don’t like phone and online chat for support, and I understand where that comes from as i’m not a fan of either in certain situations. But I can say that both support options are things that our customers have asked for. Some support issues can certainly be handled much quicker via a phone call than back and forth via email or ticketing system. The problem with both phone and online chat support is staffing. Having the staff to man the real time support. If the wait times are too long it defeats the purpose and the customers won’t like it. I will say that our own web host, FireHost, offers phone and online chat support along with their ticketing system and online chat is how I typically interact with them. We’ve toyed with the idea of providing phone support or online chat support, but it’s something that we’d have to be careful with because we wouldn’t want to introduce it and then not be able to deliver timely support due to volume.

I tried to contact GoDaddy the other day and could not find any way to contact them apart from phone and live chat. I did not know they had shelved other support methods.
At the time, I was out on the road, couldnt make an international call and after spending an hour reloading their website, never managed to get live support to become available. I couldnt even get in the queue.
Well, you get what you pay for and my reason for being with them is primarily price, not service.

I’ve been a professional customer (emails, severs, marketing and more) for more than 5 years and had always been happy with their customer service, but this recent decision is ridiculous and I am seriously considering moving to another provider now.

You can now only communicate with them by phone (wait time always more than 10 minutes when I try, have even seen it as high as 38 min) or by Live Chat (equally long wait times or service offline when I’ve tried) or Twitter (impossible to explain a problem within the character limit).

When I complained by Twitter I received an email from their “Social Media Support”, I replied with more details of the issue, received an automated response saying I would receive a response within 24 hours and then…. nothing. I complained by Twitter again and they told me the email address I’d replied to is not monitored and I have to tweet them to tell them when I’ve emailed them so they can check it. What a ludicrous set-up!

It’s been a week and I still haven’t resolved my issue (Hotmail have blacklisted some Godaddy email server IP addresses, so we and our clients often can’t send emails to Hotmail users).

Like many others above, I’m surprised they say email is the least favourite means of communication, but even if it is, why remove it altogether? Give us the choice and we’ll decide thank you. I doubt many people send them regular post either, but have they sealed up their mailbox? (maybe they have!)

I just spent 10 mins to find the “open a new ticket” tab when I found this blog. This is absolutely ridiculous. Go back in time when no-one had internet and people sent their letter by post or pigeon. No email support. It must have something to do with saving more and more money but customers from outside can’t see how. Everything is about money. I clicked in my account on the “contact support” menu and the FAQ came in. So you can spend other 30 mins to find your problem in the FAQ if you want to solve your problem instead of writing an email. This decision serves them and not the customers for sure they just want to talk it out saying “Customers love the ‘real time’ support experience.” Who says that? No-one asked me about it and I’m sure they didn’t ask anyone’s opinion about it. Footer in their page: “NEED HELP? Call our award-winning support team”. Probably they awarded themselves. Year by year everything gets more and more complicated instead of making everything simple. Godaddy, Yahoo Mail, Google Mail changes they layout every week and what you got used to last week you wont find it next week. They always hang nice words and explanations on these changes such as “fanatic new look” and “more usability”. These changes usually have nothing to do with none of those just like this missing email support. Managers just always want to show off with a new idea saying “I can improve the perfect”. Brainless idiots. Rubbish.

My GoDaddy hosted website has been experiencing intermittent downtime which is extremely frustrating! I did use their phone support once but when I got to the support assistant, my website was up again, and she couldn’t see what was wrong.

Of course, my website now is still suffering intermittent downtime and I don’t want to call everytime its down.

A host company should offer alternative contact options. Personally I do not like to call for support. It is also much easier to type out web address and issues for me.

And I can’t even find the Live Chat link now.. No more GoDaddy for me. My experience with 3 other providers previously were much better.

We have thousands of domains and now need to leave them because of this lame decision.

1. I don’t have time to wait on chat/phone for even 10 min, let alone 30

2. I need to be able to go back to old tickets to understand problems that happened in the past, as well as forward issues/resolutions to other people here at my company.

This is apparently a huge step for Godaddy to kill off low effort customer issues, meaning, if they are not willing to wait on hold for 5 to 10 minutes, then it must not be an important problem, and the customer gives up and doesnt ask for the support they need

As I’ve pointed out 3 weeks ago with this horrible GoDaddy support system, I told the support staff about how horrible their support system currently. And all I’ve heard back was “Sorry….”. I just hope she passed it on to GoDaddy management.

Whoever proposed that current support system they have right now, must be something self-fish and might have no real experience as customer who want support badly for a particular product or service.

For certain, if they don’t improve or bring back their previous support system, lots of current customers will get frustrated about it and perhaps leave.

Based on my experienced a few weeks ago, I asked the staff why the live chat is not always available. She said, it will only be available if there is a support staff online, and unfortunately, it’s not 24×7, only a few hours per day sometimes nothing, or perhaps most of the time, it’s not there.

During the time I was so frustrated in getting in contact with them, I contacted them through twitter and I give credit to their support them for this as they were able to provide support for on twitter, although it was a bit awkward as the messages are public until I was able to send them DM.

Hopefully, they’ll fix there mess with their support system at present.

From experience, the only thing I use GoDaddy for is domains. I have never had a problem getting a reliable tech support person on the phone in a reasonable amount of time. For example, I had to call about a domain transfer, and got someone in less than 7 minutes and had my answer in less than 3 minutes. It’s quicker to call and explain verbally than to explain subtleties and nuanances in multiple emails.

It’s been weeks since I first complained about Godaddy’s removal of email/ticket support (above) and nothing has improved. However, I have found a new way to vent spleen and get a reaction from them on Twitter, it’s impossible to say what you feel in a the character limit, but a picture tells a thousand words, so just prepare something and attach it when you tweet them, you can see my example here: https://twitter.com/juancampobello/status/477086909999894528/photo/1

What useless munter had the idea to take away email support from a web-based business like Godaddy? It is the single most backward thinking idea I have ever heard of. WELL DONE – YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE…. It’s tantamount to inventing the television then deciding to remove the picture because customers said it distracted them from the sound – bring back the radio….. How much money do Godaddy make from every call? Ask that question and you’ll find the answer to why the change was made in the first place. They can make money on the call, they can’t make any on an email. In some ways, it really makes no difference anyway – in all the times I have contacted their support people, either by phone or earlier by email, they were, without exception, unable to fix one single one of my issues. I always had to work it out myself in the end, or it just came right on its own.

i failed to find ticket in godaddy many times,and finally con to this page. it’s not good idea godaddy cancel the system,and the live chat section always offline for me,i’m regret to have host in godaddy. http://www.surfeasyvpn.com

i just find the way to post ticket in godaddy. go to left-top on the homepage ,click arrow-select Argential-Esanol,then on the right bottom can find”Envia una solicitud de asistencia tecnica”,I guess that’s means “ticket here”.i click the blue button,send one ticket to godaddy and promptly get confirmed email.
It’s interesting!

Yesterday night at 10pm my website went down, i called godaddy phone help line. after 10min waiting a person start assisting me and he told me that he might not be able to help me or things might be out of scope from his side, I feel he said that because there were no level 2 or 3 support person available at 10pm. He was keep putting me on hold again and again, after 1 hour i feel like he is not able to help me out. So i asked him please generate a ticket and let me go, because it was getting late my side and i have work in morning too. but he said it is not possible to generate or issue ticket until someone higher level not discuss with me on phone. I was so annoyed and i told him leave it i ll make call in morning. so far till now my website is down. I have other things to do , its not possible to hold phone in hand and wait for godaddy support system. i need something where i place my issue and godaddy work on it offline without engaging me on phone. very bad service!!!!!!!!!!!!

These guys have got to be idiots. They have always been renowned for the worst customer experience ever but they have just out done themselves. Just bought something where they overcharged me. Tried chat told 89 minutes, looked for support ticket and found can’t do hat so had to wait for 20 minutes on hold.

Net result took me 25 minutes when it should have taken 1 minute. Won’t use them again!

The live chat is not on all the time, live chat is only on for some hours, phone support is what is 24/7. I feel that is completely ridiculous especially for someone living in Africa, call rates will be unbearable. I do feel I made a big mistake joining Godaddy. Now I have a issue, I can’t call because of call rates and I have the feeling my issue cant be solved over a phone call, I can’t create a ticket and I can’t chat, now please where is the support?

Why oh why am I still with you, GoDaddy?
Oh yes, the transfers… Who wants to handle them?

Be sure of one thing. I feel like I want to transfer out every day more and more.
Well, it takes one step to start! I already transfered my first domain and hosting.
One by one, the’ll be out of your horrible service.

I don’t believe for a minute that the ticketing system was the less preferred method of support. What a bull. Someone in this company needs to get his head examined.

But of course, we complain and they will do nothing about it.
So goodbye GoDaddy. You can Go to…

well, I live in Vietnam so obviously I can’t afford to call to the states. Instead I tried the live chat: impressively effective. It took 20 minutes to get a connection, but the operator solved my problem in less than 10 minutes. With a ticket system, It would have take days for the mails to go back and forth… I THINK LIVE CHAT IS GREAT!

This is unreal! Been at godaddy since 1998…. am leaving for Bluehost with my 30 domains and hosting because of this getting rid of tickets AND chat window not even available AND long phone wait times. If you switch to a “Right Away” service it better be right away–you have to have an enormous staff ready to go because you can’t forecast demand. Way to lose a 16-year customer who only does a few tickets a year! i actually DON’T need a “right away” answer…

http://i.imgur.com/lJXL4gW.png I’m starting with the “smallest” of my clients (none of these are super popular, but GoDaddy probably cares about volume more than quality since they’re generally charging the same registration fees for most domains). Should have everything moved off in the next month or so (you’d be surprised how long it takes with GoDaddy).

Support tickets are an industry standard best practice for domain support, and the decision to remove this channel is unacceptable with regards to the level of support I expect for myself and my clients. Sure, I could still email whichever “VIP Account Representative” is assigned to the account, but the lack of a standard ticketing system is simply unprofessional and I see no reason to accommodate this when so many registrars are more than happy to be reasonable.

live chat is still there, and is very effective. Sadly it’s not there 24/7 but just during certain hours. When it’s available, you get a clickable link right under the phone assistance link. In my opinion, it would have been better to have it working 24/7 as well.

After 3 years of moderate happiness with Godaddy, this strikes it all. Ok they are cheap, so you’re not expecting the best quality servers.
But taking away support tickets.. taking away chat service at times.. what a move! I won’t call for technical support. I don’t need the typical “did you try putting it on and off again”. I’m technical myself and I just need to point everything out in an email, so they can fix the problem when they have time. And I can continue my work without having to keep my phone to my ears, or monitor the chat window.

Today even the estimated time in the chat window disappeared?? :@ Every minute I have to make sure I’ve checked the window, cause there could be a response..

Have to say that as of today their chat support is no faster or better… I have been a longtime GoDaddy customer and have stood by them as others have not… but I’m done now and will be moving all my business to another provider over the next couple of months… It is ridiculous that there is no way to contact ANYONE there through email…

I waited 45 minutes today then ‘chatted’ for over an hour after my issue was first blown off as nothing… and my issue was not solved.. .I resorted to tweeting Bob Parsons (which of course never made it to public view) and was quickly told it would be handled… after all that I was assigned a ticket and emailed from a donnotreply address… I was told that my database host info was wrong on my sites… funny… most of these had been running for several years and I changed nothing… was then told that I should look at the hosting panel to get the right names… I did look at the hosting panel when I set them up.. how else would I have had them.. because GoDaddy decided to CHANGE them without notice was somehow my issue…

Last week I had a client that was suddenly seeing almost all of his outgoing emails end up in the recipients junk mail folders… the chat reps advise after waiting 35 minutes and explaining it 4 times “he is going to need to contact the recipients and have them set-up a filter so it doesn’t go to junk mail”… really? I asked him if he was really saying that I should tell my client that he should call everyone he emails, before he emails them and tell them to set a filter so they can receive his emails… the rep said ‘yes’.. can you imagine that as being their solution?

Their chat still doesn’t notify you when you are connected… so if you don’t sit there and keep that window on top you can easily miss your spot and have to start all over again..

I don’t like their phone support for several reasons… when I use it there is no record of my conversation… I am tired of them not helping me then wanting to review my account to see if there is anything they can sell me… I want support, not a reverse sales call.

I’m done… will find a company that doesn’t make it impossible to get help.

Due to godaddy’s pathetic service, people will be rising too many tickets, which could hurt their rating during quality audit. Probably Godaddy removed it so the service personal can handle it and who has no knowledge of godaddy product. Because of this, customers also will not choose to interact with service personals. Again godaddy can save resources. Only catch is customers might move to another service provider which godaddy is gambling on it.

I’m a 4-year customer and I don’t even know about this until now, gosh. I doubt they sent any emails about this at all. They should realize that many people don’t have the luxury of time to wait for the call or chat to connect. Bad move.

I guess everyone who contacts godaddy for support is stupid, in experienced in it, and needs to be coddled by someone who knows nothing about the godaddy’s technologies. So, holding hands and singing “com-by-ya” is in order. I do not have a problem with live chat, but only for how to turn the water on for the sprinkle system. What ever happened to technical support?

I just spent 20 minutes unsuccessfully looking for GoDaddy email support; then I found this site. I agree with the prevalent opinion here – in many cases, email/tickets support is superior to call or live chat. English is my second language; my written English is reasonably good but I can’t say the same about my spoken English. I strongly prefer email contact if the issue is not urgent (most of them are not). It also gives support people time to research the issue I am asking about; on a live call they usually pretend that they know the answer even if it is not the case (not that I blame them, one cannot know every single detail about all GoDaddy products).
Anyway, time to move on. Can anyone recommend an alternative to GoDaddy Quick shopping cart? Thanks.

Godaddy has users from across the globe. Do they expect international users to be on the line for 35 mins waiting for support to respond? Do you know how much a call to the US is going to cost? This obviously a screwy non-customer centric decision.

I call it a rude low level client service, a lot of users will quit godaddy services, i wonder how the management team in godaddy accepted removing the ticket and email support, its essential for any good domain and hosting services company. people must seriously leave!

For a company like GoDaddy, I believe they should have all three methods.
Getting rid of the ticketing system was for their benefit; not the customers. I don’t believe the ticketing system was less liked by customers.
Not only does the ticketing system allow customers to gather their thoughts, etc., as others have pointed out…it also lets the GoDaddy representative thoroughly research the issue, and document solutions for the customer.
I personally feel that when a representative is live via phone or chat, they are not necessarily giving you the best solutions/answers…(unless it is a simple, question and not so much an issue). I believe they will tell you enough to have you on your way so they can get to the next customer.
I work for a small software company, and our main method for support is ticketing. This is so they customer can thoroughly document the issue, and we can research and thoroughly document a solution, and there is less of a chance of miscommunication. Furthermore, the customer has the solution documented for future use.

I had used the ticket system before, and a bunch of times, in the past and I liked it. I can see how they would much rather do phone and live chat help but there is a couple of things about this that truly upset me. First, they still have ticket and e-mail support help and you would think someone should have taken them down. They also have a link for “site suggestions,” but e-mail links on that one give you a run around also and should have been remove. Now, 8 months later, those links are still up.

Today I needed to find something to fix a problem that didn’t need right this minute answers. I search around to find my problem in the support area and I could find nothing to help me there. I did, however, find the answer elsewhere. So I was going to e-mail them the problem I had and suggest they put out an article to resolve these issues so others don’t struggle with it,

With no more e-mail support I now decided to not both because I would have to do it through live chat or phone. There are other people waiting for help on a variety of other more important issues than just a suggestion and I don’t want to contribute to that wait time. E-mail is likely the best tool for my suggestion.

I would say that I am glad they didn’t ditch phone and chat in favor of that stupid anger generator of a method that so many other places use that is now in vogue, the….”help forum! I hate that!

The emails from GoDaddy say noreply@godaddy.com, so I was relieved to find one called billing@godaddy.com. Emailed my billing complaint there, got an email back saying don’t expect a reply, you can’t contact us that way, try this phone number or this website. I went to the website. It is frustrating and ridiculous not to be able to submit a complaint via email. It was hard to find the chat option, but I eventually found it. It says estimated wait time is 2 minutes. Two minutes later it says estimated wait time is 4 minutes. Two minutes later estimated wait time is still 4 minutes. Two minutes later it’s 2 minutes. 2 minutes later 0 minutes, 2 minutes later, 0 minutes! Finally David arrives after ten minutes. What is a chat rep supposed to do about a complaint? It’s not like he can run it up the flagpole and get a response to me. To his credit, he gave me his supervisor’s email. I emailed my complaint there. We’ll see what happens.

I tried for 20 minutes looking for a viable support option, (I don’t have the time to wait for 10 minutes on the phone.) I was looking for a refund but their support is the worst I’ve actually encountered. I’m going to wait and see when the live chat option appears and have a go.

Apparently Live Chat isn’t working too well either. If you go to their very unhelpful support page, there is no way to open Chat Support! It just reads “5 a.m. to midnight MST” but it’s 2:30PM CST where I am. So, only one option left now, phone (which doesn’t look toll free to me btw, but I may be wrong). What next, telepathy or no support at all?

If Godaddy REALLY and HONESTLY believed that Live Chat and Telephone Service was THAT great – why shut down Ticketing and Emailing QUIETLY? Why not shout it from the rooftops – “You asked for it, and we have done it! FINALLY we have shut down Ticketing…. due to popular demand…”

Let’s call a spade a spade and just stop with the lies GoDaddy.
You stopped Emailing in because it just wasn’t feasible. It just wasn’t making as much money as you want. It has NOTHING – NOTHING – to do with what the customer wanted.

In fact think about these points?
-I’m hard of hearing (so I cannot call you)
-I’m partially blind (so live chat’s out the question)
-I live on the other side of the world (so whenever I DO try to Chat – you’re unavailable)
-I live in a foreign country (so a phone call to you costs me OVER what I pay you for hosting and domain).
(I know you’re thinking “oh dude you’re screwed then” but I’m just trying to illustrate a point).

But in a way I am screwed right?

Also, someone here raised a very good point about opening a Ticket Response: If I have a repeated problem I could have simply gone through my emails and looked up the solution. I cannot do that anymore.

No. The ONLY reason GoDaddy stopped email support is this. (And I wish more companies would just be HONEST about their GREED!!!) Wish they would simply say: “Look, it just wasn’t profitable for us and we need to keep making MORE MONEY. MORE MORE MORE MONEY is what we LIVE for! (We just thought if we told you our customers WANTED this and threw in a bunch of colourful words – you guys would buy it.”

Well GoDaddy, just read through these above responses and it will become CRYSTAL clear – your customers are NOT HAPPY about this decision. They DID NOT want this. And NO ONE buys your lie that “this is what our customers have asked for.”

I have been a Godaddy customer for many years and have spent a lot of money with them but am searching for a different host due to this change in support. This is horrible. The ticketing system was MUCH more convenient as busy professionals don’t always have time for synchronous support. The ticketing system allowed me to report an issue and move on with my other tasks rather than waiting on hold on the phone or waiting for the chat system to become available. As an example right now I need to report an issue but the chat system says it is currently overloaded and is unavailable. I hope GoDaddy monitors what is being said on these platforms and listens to their customers.

I run Product Management for the Hosting team inside GoDaddy and work a lot with the support side of the house. We have heard loud and clear about the need for a ticketing solution.

I see that some folks had used the old system and liked it. The fact is that system was pretty broken. People would send in an email, the rep would get it and see that there was nothing identifying the account in question and then email back. Usually 3 emails later they’d be able to engage with the actual issue.

The good news is that we’re implementing a new incident management system that will provide a bunch of support options including contextual help, ticketing and live chat. In these cases the rep you engage with will know your account and should have a good idea what you were trying to do / what help you were looking at when you requested help. An additional piece to the ticketing system will be the ability to log in and check the status of the ticket which wasn’t available in the old system (and we saw many folks get tickets and then feel that they had to call to get a status which defeated the purpose).

The next question is, “When?” followed pretty quickly by, “Why not now?!?” The answer is that we’re doing a ton of work and plan to start pilot programs with the new functionality in the next 2 months with a full rollout being planned for later in the year. We’re working with the support tools team to see if we can pull that up for Hosting-specific support.

Bill, in the meantime, as there is NO OPTION online at night, please restore email support. I have a quick question that would be fine if answered by tomorrow. No need at 1 am. to wait on the phone. Chat isn’t available anyway.
Finally, from all the messages in the thread, sounds like it takes too long to get to a chat agent.

I want to say that the combo of phone with email backup for non urgent communication worked perfectly for me.

Domain monitoring & backordering is not working. Email notifications are not being sent. Information about domains is not being updated. I called weeks ago & nothing has happened. Let them know in feedback a week ago and still not working. Go Daddy is Go Downhill!

It is so frustrating when it is not possible to contact support with email or ticket. Maybe it is more convenient to call support wihin the country of residence, but I need to make long distance calls, and sometimes it costs me (when I’m on hold for 7 minutes) even more that I payed for domain.

It is not acceptable. I have more than 70 domain names registered at godaddy, and form today I will slowly move all of my domains to the other registrar. I had a problem today which made me so frustrated over this issue of Godaddy decision not to have email or ticketing support, I tried to renew domain name, and something on the godaddy order form went wrong. Now, I don’t have 15US$ on my credit card, and I dont have domain renewed. Money is taken from the credit card on the name of Godaddy, but there is no receipt or any statement in godaddy order history, and I cannot contact godaddy to solve this issue. Chat is closed, I need to make long distance call to Ireland (USA is different time zone, so they are not available) and wait for over 10 minutes on hold paying expensive phone impulses (yes, in my country they are still expensive).

Right after I solve this issue, I’m getting away from godaddy. It becames unreliable and unpredictable. Too much for me.

Well, it is late at night and Chat is not available. So, I just wasted 15 minutes searching for their support email. I think they either need to make chat 24 hours or at least offer email when chat is closed.
I don’t want to get on the phone to get a simple question answered. Email would be fine.
I’m disappointed they leave me with NO CHOICE but phone during the evening. This is not an improvement in support.

The choice, really, is not to try to put up with all the GoDaddy nonsense but to move your sites, databases, domains, and all they have sold you out of there as soon as you can. Of course it will be painful, but in the long run you’ll be glad you did. Then stay clear of GoDaddy altogether. It’s clear how much “love” you, and everyone else here, have gotten from GD.